Glynn: > On 21/10/2009, at 8:59 AM, Brian Cameron wrote: >> PulseAudio acts as a userland mixing server which accepts all audio >> streams that the user wants to play. It then provides the ability to do >> per-application mixing. This is useful if you have multiple programs >> playing audio at the same time. You can change the volume levels of >> different programs in a single GUI. >> >> I am not sure if this is really a critical feature, though. Most audio >> programs have volume control sliders directly in the application where >> users can set the volume in a per-application fashion. > > Assuming I understand what this is capable of, I'm not sure I completely > agree. It's a very nice user experience when done well. I like the > iPhone style experience when you're listening to music, and it slowly > fades out for an incoming call.
True. I do know there has been talk recently about enhancing PulseAudio and GNOME applications so that when certain events happen (like a user receives a voicecall via ekiga or something), that this automatically mutes other audio that might be playing. That is a useful and a compelling feature that could tip the scales and make PulseAudio a better fit for integration with OpenSolaris. However, it is my understanding that this isn't yet working upstream, and is still in the design stages. As I mentioned before, adding PulseAudio to the OpenSolaris Desktop will involve a non-trivial amount of work, so I do think that we need to make sure that the benefits are significant enough to warrant doing the work. I do not think PulseAudio is there today, but that could change quickly. Though we also need to work with the Solaris Boomer/OSSv4 team. Since OSSv4 does support per-application mixing features directly, it might make more sense to integrate such desktop mixing features more directly with OSSv4 on Solaris instead of using PulseAudio. It will take some analysis time to figure out the best path forward. I have been in regular communication with Garret D'Amore about these sorts of issues, but we are still at the early stages of analysis. At the moment, I know that the Boomer/OSSv4 team is really busy working to get OSSv4 working on Sun Ray. I suspect there will not be a lot of progress to improve more general desktop audio issues, such as per-application mixing, until the Sun Ray work is done. However, once that is finished, I think that coming up with a better per-application mixing story is high on the laundry list of tasks to work on. Brian
